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U.S. Sues Businesses It Says Helped Hezbollah

The federal government on Thursday escalated its campaign to stanch the flow of what it says is dirty money to the Shiite militant group Hezbollah. Prosecutors filed a civil suit aimed at financially punishing American and Lebanese businesses that the government charges were behind a Hezbollah-controlled global network that laundered huge sums in South American cocaine proceeds.

The court action, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks nearly half a billion dollars in penalties from three Lebanese financial organizations — the now-defunct Lebanese Canadian Bank and two Beirut-based money exchange houses — and 30 auto dealers in the United States. The $480 million in penalties is the sum of the drug proceeds that are alleged to have been laundered; the government is also seeking to freeze and seize assets traceable to those companies.

The suit represents the latest effort by the Obama administration to disrupt the financial network that sustains Hezbollah, an organization that the American government has long considered a terrorist group but that has become the pre-eminent military and political power in Lebanon.

In February, after a six-year investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Treasury Department forced the closing of the Lebanese Canadian Bank and the sale of its untainted assets to a new owner.

It charged the bank with assisting a handful of account holders in a scheme to wash drug money for Colombian cartels by mixing it with the proceeds of used cars bought in the United States and sold in Africa. The government said that the cash was then flown to Lebanon and deposited first into exchange houses named in Thursday’s civil suit and then into the Lebanese Canadian Bank, with Hezbollah taking a cut of the profits.

The man accused of being the drug kingpin at the center of that case, Ayman Joumaa, was indicted on Tuesday in Virginia on federal charges that he trafficked drugs and laundered proceeds not only for the Colombian cartels, but also for the murderous Mexican gang Los Zetas. His whereabouts are unknown.

Hezbollah has dismissed the American charges as propaganda. A lawyer for Lebanese Canadian Bank’s former owners has denied wrongdoing, as have the exchange houses.

A New York Times examination published Wednesday found evidence that the now-defunct bank was a money-laundering hub for Hezbollah that went far beyond just the Joumaa-linked drug scheme. The degree to which Hezbollah’s business had come to suffuse the bank’s operations emerged as the bank’s untainted assets were being sold, with American blessings, to Société Générale de Banque au Liban, known as SGBL.

Auditors hired to scrub the bank’s books discovered nearly 200 accounts, through which hundreds of millions of dollars moved each year, suspicious for their links to Hezbollah and their classic signs of money laundering, according to people in the United States and Europe with knowledge of the process. Held mainly by Shiite businessmen in West Africa, the companies appeared to be fronts for Hezbollah to move dubious funds, for itself or others, and to mask Hezbollah’s involvement in transactions.

The civil complaint does not name SGBL, which refused to close on a deal to buy the Lebanese Canadian Bank’s clean assets unless the suspicious accounts were first excised, as a defendant. Officials familiar with the action said the government was not seeking any damages from SGBL, which the Treasury Department has said it considers a “responsible owner.”

Thursday’s complaint offers fresh details about the workings of what it says was a scheme to launder South American cocaine cash and Hezbollah’s own money, naming the American-based auto dealers and people it says were Hezbollah operatives.

For example, the action charges that Oussama Salhab was a Hezbollah operative in Togo who ran a network that transported cash from cars sold in Benin on flights to Beirut. Prosecutors say he worked with Maroun Saade — suspected of being a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Lebanese Christian political party allied with Hezbollah — who has been charged in a separate case with aiding the Taliban.

A version of this article appears in print on December 16, 2011, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Sues Businesses It Says Helped Hezbollah. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe